Workbench

08/02/2005

It's For a Friend

Professional atheletes need to hire someone to make up better excuses for them when they test positive for steroids. The apparently lawyer-generated dodge used by former Future Hall of Famer Rafael Palmeiro -- that he never "intentionally or knowingly" took steroids -- rings about as true as "my dog ate my homework."

It's the same excuse used by Barry Bonds before he went into hiding. Bonds, who is so obsessive about his health that he only eats organic vegetables, expects all of us to believe he took steroids innocently. In other words, after checking his salad greens to make sure they were fertilized only with pure manure, he turns around and gulps a bottle of something referred to only as "clear," supplied to him by a well-known steroid supplier, without asking what, exactly, "clear" might be.

Pure manure.

These are highly trained professional atheletes. They make millions a year with their bodies, performing in leagues that test for all kinds of illegal substances. They know not to eat bread with poppy seeds because they can cause false positives on test for opiates, and they know not to take anything that would unnaturally enhance their performance.

And yet, somehow, they're downing whatever people hand them without asking what it might be.

I, myself, don't buy it.

I've been a Rafael Palmeiro fan since he played for the Cubs, back when he was a skinny spray hitter Harry Carey used to refer to as "Ralph Palermo." (He called Andre Dawson "Andre Rogers" and brand new Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg "Ryne Sanderson," so I'm sure Palmiero didn't take it personally.) He's played his whole career with quiet class while running up some huge numbers.

But, in light of recent revelations, those numbers provide an interesting look at the arc of Palmeiro's career, which eerily parallels the careers of others tainted by steriod allegations.

In Palmeiro's last full year in the minors, at the AA level, he hit 12 home runs, so he didn't make his way to the Bigs based on the longball. He spent his first few years with the Cubs, and in his last season in hitter-friendly Wrigley Field -- 1988 -- he had 8 home runs and a .307 average.

Five years later, playing for Texas, his batting average dropped only slightly, but he hit almost five times as many home runs: 37. Over the next few years his production continued to rise, plateauing in the high 30s, low 40s for ten years.

Barry Bonds, who also is accused of building his career on a steroid base and who also has denied knowingly taking any banned substance, has stats that are similar to Palmeiro's, except that he further defied expectations by having both his home run total and batting average rise at the same astronomical pace. Looking at approximately the same time period -- on the assumption that steroids went league-wide sometime in the late '80s -- we see Bonds go from 24 HRs and a .282 batting average in 1988 to 46/.335 in 1993. And, when caught with his hand in the chemical cookie jar, we hear approximately the same lame excuse: I didn't know.

Sammy Sosa, another former Cub and alleged steroid devotee, played his first full season for the crosstown White Sox in 1990. He powered 15 home runs and hit .235, which is not a bad year for a skinny rookie with modest potential. From then on, Sosa's totals go nowhere but up until 1998, when he and Mark McGuire saved baseball by engaging in one of the most exciting races to a record in sport history. (McGuire, of couse, denies that ever took steroids; his former teammate and occaisional convict Jose Canseco says otherwise.) That year, Sosa hit 66/.307.

Across Major League Baseball, in the same approximate time period, the story is approximately the same. Total home runs hit by all teams rose from just over 3,000 in 1989 to a most-ever total of 5,693 in 2000. Granted, there were more teams in the league, which meant more at bats against pitchers who would otherwise labor in the obscurity of the minors. And there's a little uptick taht attibutable to new, home-run-friendly ballparks. But even controling for those variables, it's clear that there was a period when home run hitting took a spectacular leap.

Call me cynical, but I think the last 15 years in professional baseball are going to go down in history as the Steroid Era, a delineation as clear to baseball historians and fans as The Deal Ball Era is today. And I think a lot of great players from that era -- Palmeiro, Bonds, Sosa, and McGuire among them -- are going to have to come up with something better than "I didn't know" if they're going to be remembered as anything other than fraudulent Hall of Famers.